Corpora: the At sign

[Jean Veronis]

At 17:12 11/10/2001 +0200, you wrote:
>Dear All
>I have a slightly unusual request: what do the speakers of various languages
>call the at sign (@), as in the email addresses?

In French, it is called "arobas" or "arrobas" - etymology unclear. Probably 
from "a rond bas de casse" (round a lower case). Nothing to do with the 
Spanish unit of measure with the same name.

It is also sometimes called "a commercial" by analogy with the "e 
commercial" (& or "perluète").

Some people have also proposed "escargot" (i.e. snail), but it never 
worked. I suppose that the French do not accept to confuse food and 
computers :-)

By the way, the character itself is a ligature of a + d in the latin word "ad".

--what about names for "&" ?

Jean Véronis
http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/~veronis/